He forgot the rule set down by Alec Baldwin in the 6th century, “A.B.S”. ” A-Always! B-Be! S-Shooting!!!”

Woo 500 pages! let the good times roll!

http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

I’d be more excited about it, but I think this is the third time we’ve hit page 500. Originally, the first several pages were all short strip comics, but we combined them to make a couple pages out of many strips. Then we cut a few pages out of the archive completely (namely some pages where Yori thinks he’s dying and has a needlessly long flashback, we may put those in the Extras section later). So by now we’d probably be at page 510!

Ginger Mayerson

Wow. 500! So glad you’re back!

http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

I share in your jubilance!

Johannes Hjortshøj

Thats his boomstick

SoItBegins

Ahhh, the arquebus. The most complete destabilization factor to samurai rule since katana-sliced bread.

One of the reasons it was so dangerous was that samurai armor was meant to stop (or at least absorb a bit of the impact of) arrows— and samurai were deadly at close range. Any attempt to kill a samurai would then have to involve trickery/ambush (thus ninja), another samurai, or quite a lot of good luck— until the arquebus came along.

Sure, they were noisy, smoky, dubiously accurate, useless in wet weather, time-consuming to reload, held up to one musket ball at a time, and would occasionally backfire in the face of their owner… BUT the sheer power of the things overruled every drawback, shifting the balance of power in the Japanese feudal system.

In the movie Seven Samurai, all the samurai who die are killed by gunfire.

(PS: In response to the introduction of the arquebus, Japanese armor-makers started modifying their armor to include aspects of European plate armor for greater firearm resistance.)

http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

So what you’re saying is it’s all down hill from here!

SoItBegins

Downhill? Dunno about that, but things are veering every which way, yes.

KungFuKlobber

Does Genchu know Portuguese, or has he seen a gun before? I guess we’re about to find out.

Gillsing

It didn’t occur to me until now that those brackets in the word balloons were for the Captain speaking Portuguese, not for the Captain speaking Japanese. So I just thought that Genchu was the only one who was wise enough to heed the words of the crazy foreigner. But no, you’re right. Either he knows Portuguese, or he’s heard of guns before.

Or he can read minds. Or he can see into the future. Or someone else who can see into the future just warned him that he should cover his ears when the crazy foreigner is about to fire his stick.

Dorje

If he’s been to China at some point in his life explosive weapons would not be new to him. Although more likely he knows Portugese.

Guns aren’t scary at all. They’re beautiful. Almost as beautiful as swords.

Well… unless they’re pointed at you. Then they’re a *little* scary… I guess.

That said, those old Tanegashima were not on the prettier side of firearms, I admit… terrible design. I never understood how we didn’t skip the matchlock phase of firearms entirely and skip straight to flintlock – or at least the wheel lock.

http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

Luckily we got there eventually, and then it was straight on to Kalashnikovs!

Jake

personally, i like the blunderbuss. early shotgun able to fire just about anything shoved down the barrel.

Da’Zlein

And this is how Genchu will vindicate the Wataro clan, by being the only one with a rifle…

Bladist

Nah, his sales pitch was fine. His sales volume was a little loud, though.